KING: Russians throw party with mock lynching of white man in blackface

Anastasia Storozhilova shared this image, which she captioned, 'Today at the office we hanged a black man.' (xwondroxid/via Twitter)

It's easy to forget that bigotry is not an exclusive American product, but unfortunately flourishes all over the world.

On Tuesday, at a Russian government research and development office in St. Petersburg, employees held what they claimed was an American costume party of some sort. One employee, Anastasia Storozhilova, a 23-year-old engineer who works there, thought what they did was so awesome that she tweeted a photograph from the party saying, "Today at the office we hanged a black man."

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After a firestorm erupted online, she first deleted the tweet, then her Twitter account, then her Facebook account.

The damage is already done.

Speaking to Russian press, Storozhilova tried to explain the racist stunt away by claiming they were reenacting old American movies, but that excuse doesn't really pass muster.

From her tweet and the overwhelming glee seen on all of their faces, this clearly was fun for them. They had a blast, but that's what's powerful about social media. In the bubble these folk lived in, they saw nothing wrong with what they did — so much so that they wanted the world to know about it.

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Soon, she found out that what is acceptable in the bubble doesn't really fly outside of it.

The deeper, uglier message is that here in the United States and all over the world, the agonizing pain of the black experience is actually humorous and entertaining to some white people. This makes sense, though.

The lynching of black men, women, and children was often seen as a form of entertainment throughout the United States. People would pose and take photos with charred or mutilated black bodies hanging from trees. They would put the photos on postcards and send them to their friends and family. Young men would take women on dates to lynchings. Families would bring their children and they would all pose and smile with one another.